


þe bende of þis blame

by Lilliburlero



Category: Arthurian Mythology, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Genre: Closeted Character, Guilt, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Regret
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-25
Updated: 2018-11-25
Packaged: 2019-08-29 09:18:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16741240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: It takes many years for the full significance of Lady Bertilak's girdle to come to light.





	þe bende of þis blame

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kindkit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindkit/gifts).



‘To my mind,’ said Guinevere, ‘not shame but honour accrues to this badge you wear, for it stands for both man’s fallen nature and his capacity to overcome it. Your virtue is not cloistered, but sallies out, not fugitive but steadfast, and is therefore bound to receive some little dint, by which it is only improved, as a battle-scar lends dignity to a man’s face, making it more comely than that of a perfect and untried youth. Is that not so, my lord?’

It seemed to Gawain that she did not look at Arthur as she said this, nor at him, nor any other but the hacked and pitted visage of Sir Lancelot, and he thought that a little malicious in her, because the evidence of his many victories did not one whit enhance the beauty of the Ill-Made Knight, and he felt for his great friend and bedfellow on that account. But perhaps he was mistaken. The looks of queens go everywhere, and are everybody’s; nobody's, then. 

Arthur agreed heartily, laughing in his reassuring, infectious way, so that soon all the court joined in, and Gawain felt buoyed and cosseted by their mirth, as if it were a soft feather bed with the curtains closely drawn on a cold winter morning. Then the king ordered that every knight of the Round Table should wear a sash of green in commemoration of Gawain’s adventure, and that was as if someone had torn the hangings aside and dashed the contents of the chamber pot in his face. A man’s privy mortifications are one thing (even if, perhaps especially if, others know enough of their significance to murmur of them in melancholy sympathy) but for his friends to share in them publicly is quite another. 

But as time went by, and the green and gold baldrics assumed the quality of mere knightly furniture (for nothing can remain conspicuous forever, even to the most tender of sensibilities, and that Gawain’s was not) he contrived to see an aptness in the decoration that they all wore atop their armour, he against his skin. For his secret was that the temptation he had resisted was not the one that came tripping into his very bedchamber a-mornings, but a stage further in the game, the one that came hot and rank from the chase to envelop him, just as dusk crept from gnarled forest and ancient heath, lapping pale and dainty walls in its primitive embrace. 

And later still, under drenched canvas in Brittany, with three brothers dead and the throne he had sworn to defend with his life usurped by the fourth, he finally understood that there had been no triumph over temptation, only a pitiful self-deceit, that had made him Knight of Maidens because he could not countenance pledging love to even one. Morgan had woven subtler magic than he knew into the green and gilt of the girdle, frayed now, stained and tarnished with the blood and sweat of his body over many years. He had brought back to Camelot not the seed of unchastity but that of infidelity, infidelity to one’s own nature, and it had sprung in the breast that had many nights lain beside his, flowered in that ill-favoured face. Tomorrow he must meet Lancelot as an implacable enemy, and only one of them would see the sun set to rise again; for the other, there could be only the closing of the day. Gawain knew it must be he who would fall, as he should have long ago, loving and dying to live once more, at the Green Chapel.

**Author's Note:**

> This includes Arthurian material from a variety of sources, medieval and modern: I've elided and ignored others.
> 
> I've imagined Gawain and Lancelot as bedfellows in the medieval and early modern sense: close friends and confidants who literally (but not necessarily sexually) share a bed.


End file.
